David Birch: Identity without a name

Ring Could Log Users In to Houses, Phones and Website as Soon as Next MonthThe need for more passwords that our feeble human brains struggle to remember can make it feel like we work for the machines instead of the other way around. Wearable, and even embeddable, login storage has emerged has a possible solution. After Google researchers floated the idea of a USB stick or a ring that would generate login keys, it appeared the Web giant would lead the way. But a UK project recently closed a $380,000 Kickstarter campaign, promising delivery of 61,000 password-bearing rings in September. The company, NFC Ring, makes a simple silver ring with two near-field communication transmitters inside it, storing access information that can potentially be used to unlock phones, cars or houses or even to log in to websites. One transmitter faces out and stores information that the user may want to share, such as his or her contact information.

Facebook privacy and kids: Don’t post photos of your kids onlinePhoto by Hemera/Thinkstock I vividly remember the Facebook post. It was my friend’s 5-year-old daughter “Kate,” (a pseudonym) standing outside of her house in a bright yellow bikini, the street address clearly visible behind her on the front door. A caption read “Leaving for our annual Labor Day weekend at the beach,” and beneath it were more than 50 likes and comments from friends—including many “friends” that Kate’s mom barely knew. The picture had been uploaded to a Facebook album, and there were 114 shots just of Kate: freshly cleaned and swaddled on the day of her birth … giving her Labradoodle a kiss … playing on a swing set. But there were also photos of her in a bathtub and an awkward moment posing in her mother’s lacy pink bra.

CA School District Announces It's Doing Round-The-Clock Monitoring Of Its 13,000 Students' Social Media ActivitiesThe Glendale School District in California is facing some backlash from the recent news that it has retained the services of Geo Listening to track its students' social media activity. The rationale behind the program is (of course) the students' safety. After collecting information from students' posts on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, Geo Listening will provide Glendale school officials with a daily report that categorizes posts by their frequency and how they relate to cyber-bullying, harm, hate, despair, substance abuse, vandalism and truancy.Glendale Unified, which piloted the service at Hoover, Glendale and Crescenta Valley high schools last year, will pay the company $40,500 to monitor posts made by about 13,000 middle school and high school students at eight Glendale schools. Glendale Unified Supt.

Breakthrough: The World’s First Carbon Nanotube Computer"'m just wondering that, with less and less electricity required to make these "switches" in a carbon-nanotube processor work, how vulnerable does it make them to being accidentally switched by the ambient, static electricity already in the atmosphere, like from thunderstorms or generated by household appliances, etc." That is one of the reasons why you when you open your computer, you ground yourself first before touching circuit boards. I assume these new circuits would be protected and shielded in the same manner as circuits made of silicon are now. And they'd be handled with the same precautions.

Supreme Court: DNA swab after arrest is legitimate searchThe justices of the U.S. Supreme Court sit for their official photograph on October 8, 2010, at the Supreme Court. Front row, from left: Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Chief Justice John G.Facebook Now Knows What You're Buying at Drug StoresIn an attempt to give advertisers more information about the effectiveness of ads, Facebook has partnered with Datalogix, a company that "can track whether people who see ads on the social networking site end up buying those products in stores," as The Financial Times's Emily Steel and April Dembosky explain. Advertisers have complained that Facebook doesn't give them any way to see if ads lead to buying. This new partnership is their response. The service will link up the 70 million households worth of purchasing information that Datalogix has with Facebook profiles so they can see if the ads you see changes the stuff you buy and tell advertisers whether their ads are working.

Accelerator on a chip: Technology could spawn new generations of smaller, less expensive devices for science, medicineIn an advance that could dramatically shrink particle accelerators for science and medicine, researchers used a laser to accelerate electrons at a rate 10 times higher than conventional technology in a nanostructured glass chip smaller than a grain of rice. The achievement was reported today in Nature by a team including scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University.

5 Shocking Ways The World Is About To ChangeFirst off, fuck the apocalypse and everybody who predicts it. There's always an apocalypse somewhere, and our pop culture's obsession with an America ruined by war/disease/starvation basically boils down to, "Can you imagine if the shit that's constantly happening in the Third World happened to us?" There's somebody out there living the social breakdown of The Walking Dead right now. Only instead of zombies, it's some warlord's death squads, and a crossbow won't do shit.

Brazil looks to break from US-centric Internet (Update 2)Brazil plans to divorce itself from the U.S.-centric Internet over Washington's widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments. President Dilma Rousseff ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the U.S.

HP Memristors Will Reinvent Computer Memory 'by 2014'By the end of 2012, HP may introduce a new breed of electrical building-block: the memristor. Image: Luke Kilpatrick/Flickr HP is two and half years away from offering hardware that stores data with memristors, a new breed of electrical building-block that could lead to servers and other devices that are far more efficient than today’s machines, according to report citing one of the technology’s inventors. As reported by The Register, at a recent conference in Oxnard, California, HP’s Stan Williams said that commercial memristor hardware will be available by the end of 2014 at the earliest. A company spokesman tells us that the company has not officially announced its plan for memristors.